Encinitas museum to begin expansion effort

ENCINITAS  The San Dieguito Heritage Museum won permission from the city Thursday to start creating a small village of buildings representing moments in the region’s history.

An adobe home, a barn housing agricultural exhibits, and a row of storefronts are planned. But, first comes the reassembly the old Teten home, which now sits sadly in two pieces behind a wooden fence at the back end of the museum site on Quail Gardens Drive.

“What we’re going to do now is to pick it up and put it on a permanent foundation,” museum board past President Susan Steele said moments after the Encinitas Planning Commission unanimously voted Thursday to approve the museum’s master planning document.

Project supporters already have raised the $65,500 needed to do the job, longtime volunteer David Oakley said.

“We’re ready to move (the home) before the first of the year,” Steele said, adding that they hope to have school children touring the renovated structure during the 2014-15 school year.

Located just north of San Diego Botanic Garden, the heritage museum is a popular destination for third-graders in the Encinitas Union School District because they’re studying local history, museum docents said.

It’s also famous for two big food festivals — its Deep Pit Barbecue, which has been held for 25 years, and its 5-year-old Lima Bean Faire, which occurs late this month.

Founded in 1988, the heritage organization spent part of its early years in an old gas station downtown before relocating to the city-owned, Quail Gardens Drive site in 2007, Steele said. The city gave the museum a 50-year lease, and museum volunteers began relocating historic items onto the site.

The museum property now contains a main display building, a small “general store” structure, the front of an old Texaco gas station with an old-style pump, an old fire truck, and farming equipment, including a massive lima bean harvesting machine that can process several 100-pound bags of beans at a time.

Planning Commissioner Tony Brandenburg said moments before Thursday’s vote that his relatives are among the museum’s donors — they contributed old railroad timetables.

“I think this is fantastic,” he said of the museum’s plans to re-create historic buildings. “Unless you know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going.”

Steele said that after the Teten house project concludes, they will start on the downtown storefront area. And, after that they’ll move on to the barn building, she added.

Some 40 people, many of them museum docents and board members, attended Thursday’s commission meeting and most loudly applauded after the vote.

However, commissioners heard from two speakers who said the city should require a wider wetlands buffer area for the project. The city standard is 50 feet, but this project is only required to maintain a 5 to 10-foot buffer area, noted former city mayor Sheila Cameron and frequent city meeting attendee Donna Westbrook. Since the city owns this property, it should hold itself to the higher standard, Westbrook said.

City planning department staff members said there was flexibility in the wetlands buffer requirement, and mentioned that the botanic garden next to the museum was granted a similar buffer size. Museum officials said the area isn’t a true “wetlands,” it’s a drainage ditch with little vegetation.